Sans car, day 1

As of Saturday evening, my kid brother is the proud new owner of my 2002 Ford Focus. I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to sell it, since I JUST PAID IT OFF, but it's sold. I was a crazy hippy before, but now I'm an EXTRA crazy hippy. Because Southern Californians have cars. WE JUST DO. And SoCal natives are very attached to their cars, in the way most humans might be attached to a pet, or a child, or a limb. But the car and I never REALLY got along anyway, so perhaps it's for the best that I finally let go -- and now, the car is in a relationship with someone who really LOVES HIM.

Having joined the ranks of the transportationally challenged, Sunday was a very eventful adventure in figuring out how to do things without a car. Things like running errands, which just became exponentially more complicated.

My bicycle has been sitting in my office with a flat tire for the past year, since the student to whom I loaned it returned it to me last summer. A couple weeks ago I brought it home, where it sat chained to the fence with a still-flat tire until yesterday. When I changed the inner tube on my bicycle tire ALL BY MYSELF, and in doing so, discovered that I do not own a wrench. So I asked my neighbor if she had a wrench I could borrow (which she did), and when peering into her house, it became apparent that the snoring I hear through the wall every night must be from someone sleeping in her kitchen, which is decidedly odd. Unless her dog snores. Or maybe she sleeps in the kitchen. But I digress...

Once the tire was replaced, I discovered that not only was the tire flat, but the wheel was BENT. And so I have learned to never loan out my bicycle to students. Fortunately it was not bent beyond functioning, so I rode it up the hill to the bicycle repair shop, where I was told that it will cost $20 and take 3 days to repair. I'm not sure how the math works on that, since that works out to less than $7 PER DAY in wages, but I'll be taking it in this week to be fixed, since now those are my only wheels (other than the wheels on the bus, which do, in fact, go round and round).